iContact prides itself on its industry-leading deliverability. In order to maintain that reputation, we hold our customers accountable for many deliverability-focused policies — sending to properly opted-in lists, making sure their sign-up forms are constructed according to CAN-SPAM policy, and even holding them to policies pertaining to bounce and complaint volumes.

It’s all part of an effort to ensure that our sending platform — used by tens of thousands of companies each day — is the best it can be.

But it’s not all permissions and best practices. iContact has a policy regarding prohibited content, which you may or may not have read. Don’t worry if you haven’t; you are in good company.

Essentially, the policy outlines the kind of content we don’t allow our customers to send. There’s the illegal and illicit stuff — pornography, lewd content, illegal drugs, Ponzi schemes, computer viruses, instructions for making bombs and firearms, exhortations to violence, libel and slander — and that’s all pretty cut-and-dried. I don’t think anyone would argue that sending that kind of content isn’t bad, damaging, harmful, or illegal in some way.

Don’t get us wrong. We’re not the morality police. We all weren’t the hall monitors in elementary school. If it’s your life’s dream to mastermind a pyramid scheme, we have nothing against you doing so. No judging, honest! You just can’t use iContact to build your pyramid.

You might wonder why we take that stance. What makes emails with this content worth prohibiting? What’s so bad about an email that gives people a way — legitimate or not — to achieve financial independence by getting rich quickly?

Well, for one, from a very statistical and objective standpoint, those emails are bad for sender reputation. Among such accounts we have observed at one time or another, we have seen bounce rates 600% higher than the industry average, complaint volumes 30 times the industry average, and as many as 57,400 contacts marking themselves as Do Not Contact. And that’s just one account during the course of one quarter.

These numbers unequivocally affect the sending reputation for a single company. Exacerbated across multiple companies, sending IPs, and iContact sender pools, the effects get extended to companies that have done nothing wrong. Which is why, objectively speaking, that content is bad for business.

But if numbers aren’t really your thing, take this hypothetical situation to heart: A customer calls in because one of his contacts isn’t receiving his emails. We investigate the issue and learn that the contact’s company blocks email from iContact’s sending domain because that domain is associated with bad content or spam. Unknowingly harboring one bad actor creates a chain reaction of bad reputation that moves quickly and can be difficult to recover from. So we don’t allow it in the first place. And if we uncover it, the removal is swift.

As an online marketing service, iContact and Vocus have your best interests in mind when we set deliverability policies, whether they relate to content or tolerable metrics. If you ever have questions about our deliverability standards, please email us at deliverability@icontact.com.